War in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: an update

Translated by Giulia Maffeis

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been the playground of a violent and complex network of internal conflicts for at least thirty years, with multiple armed rebel groups as the main actors. The inevitable victims are the population, forced to flee the country or leave their homes: there are about 6.5 million internally displaced people (according to OCHA), many of whom live in overcrowded areas vulnerable to disease.

 Congo is indeed suffering from one of the most serious humanitarian crises in the world, as the country faces not only constant human rights violations but also the outbreak of the Mpox epidemic, or monkeypox, a viral infection that was declared by the World Health Organization in August of this year as a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC).

The thread marking the country’s history and seems to condemn it to conflict is the enormous wealth in mineral resources: the extraction of gold, copper, cobalt, and coltan is the main reason for exploitation and concentration of interests, not only local but also global, as coltan and cobalt are essential minerals for the production of all electronic devices, from mobile phones to computers and electrical machines. Furthermore, cobalt batteries represent the current "green alternative" to lithium batteries, implying that the mineral will be increasingly in demand in the years to come.

For this reason, the M23 (one of the most powerful rebel groups, which according to the Congolese government and various United Nations experts is supported by neighboring Rwanda, interested in a war by proxy) has recently established total control over the territories of North Kivu, where regions with a high concentration of coltan are placed, generating a profit of about $300,000 per month from them.

The exploitation and smuggling of minerals have become means of oppression and power for rebel gangs in a conflict rooted in the ethnic hatred between the two main cultural and religious groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi, whose clash culminated in the genocide of the latter in Rwanda in 1994.

The Congolese Fight For Their Own Wealth

The dossier The Congolese Fight For Their Own Wealth, produced on June 25, 2024, by the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—in collaboration with the Andrée Blouin Cultural Center, the Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa (CERECK), and Likambo Ya Mabele (Movement for Land Sovereignty)—shows that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the richest countries in the world, with its untouched mineral reserves alone valued at $24 trillion. However, 74.6% of the population lives on about $2 a day, and one in six Congolese lives in extreme poverty.

The reason is the impossibility of the population to control their wealth: this "widespread theft," as it was called in the dossier, refers to the control of riches through the exploitation of civilians, which has weighed on the Congolese since the 1930s and was not defeated even with the establishment of the Mouvement National Congolais in 1958, which led to independence from Belgium in 1960 but was soon neutralized (with the assassination of its leader, the pro-communist Pan-Africanist Patrice Lumumba) and effectively reduced to a puppet government.

Economic interests do not only concern the internal politics of the DRC: the Kivu region has been the reason for decades of commercial relations with countries like Rwanda and Uganda, geographically close to the region, which export raw materials to the Congo and import smuggled minerals.

The issue goes far beyond the continent: since the 1970s, there has been strong interference from multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which impose neoliberal policies as a requirement for receiving loans, devastating the local economy. In 2002, a new formulation of mining law in the DRC facilitated extraction companies from the United States and Europe with favorable taxation, incentives for exploration, and the ability to circumvent labor and environmental regulations.

The area has also become of great interest to the Chinese economy, adding another actor to the scene.

The Presence of the UN

On June 20, 2024, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) issued a press statement condemning "in the strongest possible terms" the violence against civilians in the DRC. The United Nations has a blue helmet mission on the ground, MONUSCO (United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

This mission, although in various forms, has been active since 1999 but is considered by many to be a failure: despite being present in the northeast of the country, the main center of illegal mineral trafficking, UN forces do not seem to have the power to fight the network of smuggling and exploitation. For this reason, the Congolese government has requested the withdrawal of the mission, which began in April in South Kivu, despite MONUSCO chief Bintou Keita stating to the UN General Assembly that armed groups "are making the precarious security situation and stability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo  and the region worse, aggravating the current humanitarian situation." She also called for international sanctions to be imposed.

In August, the UNSC adopted a resolution requesting MONUSCO's support for another United Nations project active in the Congo, the Southern African Development Community Mission in the DRC (SAMIDRC), which began in December 2023.

The Voices of the Congolese

The current situation does not see any positive implications in the short term. Keeping in mind that in power struggles it is always the people who lose everything, we report the conclusion of the aforementioned dossier, where the voices of Congolese activists have found space to express what they believe are the eight fundamental points for their liberation: protection of land, economic autonomy, reconstruction of social relations, state justice, dignity, education in critical thinking, production and dissemination of Congolese culture, and the creation of collectives of and for citizens.